Agencies to work lines of business into EAs

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With the Office of Management and Budget pushing agencies to focus on core mission needs, enterprise architects and business managers will be expected over the next year to develop modernization blueprints for their specific lines of business instead of looking to modernize back-office functions.

Dick Burk, OMB's chief architect, said his office will release segment architecture guidance by mid-October to help agencies develop baseline and target architectures for mission-critical lines of business. The segment architecture is one of three objectives OMB is focusing on over the next year.

Burk said his office will release several other documents in support of the objectives, which include incorporating cross-agency initiatives, such as the move to IP version 6, in the agency's EA, and developing and implementing better metrics to quantify the success of agency blueprints.

OMB will issue Federal Transition Framework Version 1.0 by the end of September. The White House issued the draft version of FTF in July. The framework gives agencies a standard way of describing cross-agency initiatives and makes the sharing of that information easier.

OMB officials are asking agencies, beginning with the fiscal 2009 budget submission, to adhere to a more structured way of characterizing governmentwide projects that can be mapped to the Federal Enterprise Architecture reference models.

Burk, at an EA conference earlier this month in Washington, said the updated FTF would include 17 cross-agency initiatives, including Homeland Security Presidential Directive-12, IPv6 and the Line of Business Consolidation initiatives.

'We want agencies to bake the cross-agency initiatives into their EAs,' he said.

OMB also this month will issue EA Assessment Version 2.1 to incorporate agencies' implementation of cross-agency projects and improved measures to determine success.

While OMB is busy this fall, the CIO Council's Architecture and Infrastructure Data Subcommittee will be identifying standards and conventions across the government to make data reuse easier, said Charles Havekost, co-chairman of the full committee and Health and Human Services Department CIO.

The services subcommittee also will focus on how to make service reuse easier.'We need to make a lot of headway in those two areas,' Havekost said. 'There is a lot of public information available, and if you put it together, you will get more value.'